Last flight of the Space Shuttle: a 30-year retrospective

Over the past 30 years, a space shuttle platform has powered the US manned …

The United States has been a space-faring nation for just over 50 years, ever since Alan Shepard's suborbital pop shot aboard Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961. In the following eight years, the US, and mankind, went from being earthbound to making the first lunar landing.

Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were followed by the longest lull in America's manned space program to date, but starting in 1981 with the maiden flight of Columbia, the space shuttle program became the stalwart backbone of America's manned space flight program. With the final planned shuttle mission only hours from its scheduled launch, we take a moment to look back at over 30 years of history, achievements, and tragic failures.

The Space Shuttle—solid rocket boosters, external tank, and orbiter stack—is one of (if not the most) complicated machine ever built. It is simply an engineering marvel, but the complexity comes at a cost. I recall hearing that the Saturn V moon rocket had over a million separate components; that meant even a 99.9 percent success rate for parts left over 1,000 parts to fail. The shuttle is far more complex than a conventional Saturn V; ponder the perfection needed to keep such a machine flying and spaceworthy.

Early estimates by managers at NASA put the risk of catastrophic failure during a mission at 1 in 100,000; engineers, on the other hand, put the estimate at 1 in 100. A study recently released using all the data available from 30 years of flights reveals that the danger was in fact much higher.

According to the report, the chances of catastrophic loss of craft and crew during the first nine flights was a pucker-inducing 1 in 9. Later flights and safety improvements decreased this risk to 1 in 90. Given these numbers, NASA statistically had a only a six percent chance of completing 25 flights without the loss of an astronaut crew!

Even given those dire odds, astronauts bravely took bold steps beyond the terrestrial confines in order to count themselves among the few in human history who have traveled to outer space. Many of them did so on the shuttle.

The Post-Apollo era

So alone. Apollo 17 members explore the moon.

As Eugene Cernan stepped off the ground of the Taurus-Littrow valley and onto the ladder of the lunar module Challenger, he became the last man to step foot on another astronomical body. His mission, Apollo 17, took place in December 1972; 39 years later, we haven't left the confines of low Earth orbit again.

After the cancellation of Apollo, NASA used the leftover Saturn rockets to perform two classes of missions. First was the launch and manning of Skylab, America's first and only space station. Three manned missions were flown to Skylab in 1973 and 1974, allowing astronauts to live and work in the small space station for a total of 171 days. The last flight of Apollo was in July 1975, for the Apollo-Soyuz test project. While the Cold War simmered on earth, US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts met in orbit and shook hands above France.

But after the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, NASA conducted no manned spaceflights until the first flight of the shuttle program six years later.

Development

People started thinking about the craft that would become the Space Shuttle long before anyone set foot on the Moon. The idea of a spaceplane that would land horizontally has its foundations in the X-15 program of the 1950s, but serious discussion of a space shuttle began in 1969, when the National Aeronautics and Space Council met to discuss the direction of US manned spaceflight in a post-Apollo era. The council seriously considered four choices: a manned mission to Mars, further lunar missions and exploration, low earth orbit infrastructure (Earth-to-orbit shuttle and space station), and the disbanding of manned flight altogether.

The group decided on the construction of a low Earth orbit infrastructure. While this has brought numerous benefits, it has also trapped us in an awkward space-faring adolescence, with nowhere in particular to go. However, this decision left NASA with a number of goals and research avenues to pursue.

The first issue became what the primary focus should be: the construction of an orbital space station or the creation of a new launch platform? Even if the focus were to be a space station, questions remained about how to get the necessary parts to orbit.

One option was developing a new platform and building a space station over the course of many, many flights. An alternative was to continue building and using the existing Saturn V infrastructure—which could get the needed space station components to orbit in relatively few launches. In the end, the decision was made to go with a new, reusable launch platform. It was argued that, given enough launches, a reusable launch system would be the cheaper route.

Since the first days of Robert Goddard's liquid-fueled rockets, manned launch vehicles had followed a similar one-shot design. A powerful rocket, storing all its needed fuel to get to its destination—in one or multiple stages—would be discarded after its usefulness to the flight was over. Often, the only part to return to Earth in one piece was the crew module that kept the astronauts safe, and none of these were ever designed to be reused for spaceflight again. In the design of the space shuttle, the question became one of how reusable was it going to be?

In the end, the Shuttle design was a drastic departure from the multi-stage rockets of the prior NASA missions. The Space Shuttle is not a single vehicle; rather, it's what is referred to as the "stack": an external fuel tank (to keep the main craft's weight down and payload area up), a pair of reusable solid rocket boosters (chosen for their simpler design), and the orbital vehicle itself (a winged, lifting-body glider) powered by three liquid-fueled main engines. In this setup, both of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) and the entire orbital vehicle were designed to be completely reusable.

In the 30+ years that the Shuttle program has been active, a total of five different spaceworthy orbiters—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour—have been built and have flown over 130 missions. Those missions have included the construction of the International Space Station (ISS), which has fulfilled the second goal that the National Aeronautics and Space Council had chosen shortly after man first set foot on the Moon.

"Many rejoiced at the success of the Mars rovers, but that response would be nothing compared to the world-wide exultation should a member of our species ever step foot on another planetary body. I was not alive to see any of the moon landings, yet I truly hope to live long enough to see mankind step foot on another planet"

Amen to that ! Sums up my feelings exactly (and I guess I'm not alone here).

An important omission is how much politics drove the design of the shuttle. NASA originally wanted a ship that was about half to 2/3 the size of the final product, with stub wings and a metallic heat shield rather than the fragile ceramic one that ended up being fitted, and boosters based either on a Saturn first and second stage or a newly designed "flyback" booster. But budgetary cuts by Congress and the administration forced NASA to first go to the Air Force for budgetary help, and the AF wanted any system they paid for to be able to carry a 25-ton payload (to launch the huge Keyhole spy sats) and to be able to land at Vandenberg on a once-around abort on a polar trajectory (in order to launch those Keyhole spy sats, and other military hardware, without actually having to fly over the Soviet Union) which required a much larger ship with double the landing crossrange. A metallic heatshield would have been far too heavy to cover the enlarged fuselage and extended wings, so the ceramic tiles were developed.

The increased cost of the orbiter then forced NASA to defer their advanced booster designs for a cheaper solid-based concept, and because Thiokol was favored politically, they won out over Aerojet. And since Thiokol was based in Utah and the loaded casings had to be delivered by rail, the SRBs themselves had to broken up into segments that were just smaller than the maximum size and weight permitted on the railways, rather than the one piece monolithic castings that Aerojet could have barged up from their plant in South Florida.

So there you go. The root technical causes for both shuttle accidents stem from political decisions made at the beginning of the program.

Quote:

Since there are so few remaining orbiters, NASA could not place one everywhere that wanted one, but the omission of the Johnson Space Center in Houston—home of mission control for all 30 years of the shuttle program—is an odd decision. It has left some asking how strongly politics (as opposed to the locations importance to the shuttle program) played a role in the assignment of the final locations of the orbiters.

Considering that the placement of JSC in the first place was almost entirely political, I don't feel too sorry for them.

Space proved harsher, bigger, and less immediately exciting than we once dreamt it to be. Until one of these things changes, the future of space exploration should be robotic. It would be exciting to see a human being on Mars (or even on the Moon again), but by the time we would be able to do that, the robotic equivalent would already be able to produce much better results (and still be cheaper and safer). So it would have to be an ego thing, more than anything else...

Historically, manned launch vehicles—Redstone, Titan II, Soyuz, Saturn Ib and V—had one thing in common: the spacecraft itself was at the top of the rocket. This is significant because it means that minor problems with the exterior of the launch vehicle cannot greatly impact the spacecraft (of course, a catastrophic failure means you're screwed regardless of capsule placement).

I don't think this is correct. Nearly all crewed capsule designs employ a launch escape system that is capable of rescuing the crew module from as much as a total disintegration of the booster vehicle, which I would consider a catastrophic failure!

My Great Grandmother went from no heavier then air flight to a man on the moon in her lifetime. I had hoped that we would have a more futuristic future in my lifetime. i.e. human on Mars, moon bases, etc.Now I just hope the USA has its own man rated spacecraft again before I pass away. Or hope that the private sector can pull it off.

That's a neat bit of rocket history I was unaware of. Thanks for posting that clip.

That clip is from the Discovery TV miniseries called "Moon Machines." It is about Apollo, not about the astronauts or the missions themselves, but the design, engineering, and testing effort that went into the project. I found the series riveting and it's absolutely one of my favorite pieces of television.

Personally I've always been fascinated by the Buran space shuttle which can fly itself unmanned and annoyed that the Enterprise never made it into space. Anyways best of luck to the Atlantis on her last flight. I would have liked to see the shuttle program continue, but with the ISS nearing completion, I guess the risk becomes an increasing factor over reward.

I was not alive to see any of the moon landings, yet I truly hope to live long enough to see mankind step foot on another planet.

I was just shy of five years old when Apollo 11 landed. I remember it; of course my parents made me watch. I can recall the tension in the room as Aldrin was calling out the position numbers during the extended landing sequence. To me that sequence seemed to take forever! But they landed safely, and everyone in the room stopped holding their breath. I got to stay up past my bedtime that night and see Armstrong and Aldrin take that first moon walk. And we went outside and looked up at the moon. It was A Big Deal.

I'm sad that as a nation, we have decided to stop putting humans in space. I know that if humanity doesn't find ways to live in space and/or colonize other worlds, we're just another species faced with extinction sooner or later. So I am hopeful that other nations will continue the work, and that the US will eventually find a way to get back out there.

I'm sad that as a nation, we have decided to stop putting humans in space. I know that if humanity doesn't find ways to live in space and/or colonize other worlds, we're just another species faced with extinction sooner or later. So I am hopeful that other nations will continue the work, and that the US will eventually find a way to get back out there.

If we don't find a way back out there, then that's just proof that we deserve extinction. Humans have to be willing to make the investment towards that future, rather than dumping ten billion a month into middle eastern wars, or letting such ponderously complex financial jokes happen with the major European powers.

"While SpaceShipOne made a nice suborbital pop-shot, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft reached orbit at the end of last year atop a Falcon 9 rocket—making SpaceX the first non-governmental organization to get a viable space craft to orbit." SpaceX was not the first NGO to get a viable space craft to orbit, they were the first NGO to recover a spacecraft from orbit. It's the orbital reentry that is difficult, not the actual launch.

Absolutely loved the article! The Space Shuttle has been an icon in my life since I was born (26 years to the day, in fact, so I hope it indeed launches on time!) It is strange to think of a world without the Space Shuttle, but much, much more difficult to process the fact that we have nothing with which to replace it. I sure hope that we will realize once again the importance of continuing the goal of conquering the final frontier...

Would it be too much to dream/hope that somewhere in that vast black budget of the Air Force, they have a big brother to their X-37, perhaps a spiritual successor to the X-33/VentureStar? A human rated spacecraft that perhaps could go farther out to space than the Space Shuttle ever could?

My Great Grandmother went from no heavier then air flight to a man on the moon in her lifetime. I had hoped that we would have a more futuristic future in my lifetime. i.e. human on Mars, moon bases, etc.

If the budgets of NASA and the DoD had been swapped over the last decade, we'd have warp drive and transporters by now. Imagine if those trillions of dollars had gone into science instead.

And so a technological dead-end, a costly albatross, self-terminates under a public whiff of failure. For those in the know, the failure was evident decades ago.

Good riddance. Manned space flight shall be conquered by enterprise, as soon as it becomes profitable to do so, and not a day earlier.

In the meantime, robots will do, and quite well.

Only problem is that private enterprise wants to profit in the short term (with few exceptions having CEOs with more braincells than a run over piece of rock). Long term investment and high risks that space exploration is will never fit in to the short term profit maximising agenda of private companies. That's why state is there. To provide the push for the stuff that is just too far away for companies to deal with. That is why most fundamental research is done by governments and not by companies.

Also it's easy to second guess everything now. Back when shuttle was designed it was probably the best compromise considering the resources and political changes. I'm sure that NASA could have designed a better system but question is would have politicians let them? The whole cost of shuttle program is peanuts. 100 bil dollars over 30 years is just no money what so ever. Banks in Germany got 6 times that during the last crisis and that was inside a few months all for the benefit of propping up failed enterprise and insane bonus culture. So, no, shuttle was definitely not a waste of money.

Two fascinating facts about the Space Shuttle that I learned recently...

1. With the main engines (the cone shape nozzle you see at the end), the exhaust temperatures are in excess of 3000 degrees. So NASA needed a way to keep these cones cool as the rocket fuel burned and exited. The solution was in the rocket fuel itself - the liquid oxygen which is super cool - this liquid actually travels on the outside of the cone (the small circular pipes you see running on the outside of the nozzle) and once they reach the end of the nozzle (the open end) they travel back inside the nozzle up tiny little tubes and then mix up with the rest of the rocket fuel and get burned to provide the thrust.

2. At the launchpad just after the engines have been switched on but before lift off, you see a lot of water being sprayed under the shuttle. I always thought this was because of the hot exhaust fuel and that they were trying to keep the surrounding areas cool. However it is infact to keep the sound down and protect the infrastructure in terms of a sonic boom, not heat. The launch would actually be way louder and the noise would actually damage the surrounding support structures. So all those water droplets actually absorb the energy and prevent any damage and reduce the noise.

To me this is a sad day, like when us Brits lost the Concorde. Obviously they are in 2 different leagues, however they were both unique and were ahead of their times and served a great purpose. Sadly with both of them costs were always the weakest factor. An end of an era indeed!

"The first issue became what the primary focus should be: the construction of an orbital space station or the creation of a new launch platform? Even if the focus were to be a space station, questions remained about how to get the necessary parts to orbit."

According to Heppenheimer there was no debate, the Shuttle was intended to supply manpower and supplies only. The station was to be constructed using Saturn INT-21 and similar conversions.

"In the end, the decision was made to go with a new, reusable launch platform. It was argued that, given enough launches, a reusable launch system would be the cheaper route."

I think this is where the article goes badly wrong. It implies that this decision was made early in the program's definition phase, in fact, it occurred almost at the very end.

If you examine the Phase I and Phase II entries to the program, they are all small, completely reusable, and had limited cross-range capability. This was in keeping with a NASA mission to a space station. Cargo loads were generally on the order of 20,000 lbs max, and cross-range was normally accomplished using lifting bodies or very small normal wing in conjunction with a blunt-body re-entry profile. Most designs added jet engines for improved range and various abort options.

As the program started to unravel, NASA went to the USAF and basically offered to launch their spy sats for free if they would drop their own medium lift efforts like Titan C. The USAF agreed, but only if the design met certain addition requirements - it needed to do an "abort once around" from a polar orbit, and it needed to launch the new 40,000 lbs spy sats coming up in the 1980s. This meant that the cross-range had to increase to 1,000 miles, and the payload from KSC to 65,000 lbs.

The resulting design was utterly unlike the Shuttles NASA had been developing. It would also cost *much* more to develop. When Congress balked, NASA responded by hiring Mathematica to report on the project=. This report stated that a fully-reusable design would only recoup its extra development costs if it was used for a very large number of launches. In order to reach this level, NASA had to put everything onto the Shuttle. This meant that the space station had to move from Saturn to Shuttle.

All of this occurred long after the Phase II downselect. Basically the program had to complete re-set at this point, and entirely new designs were submitted.

Two fascinating facts about the Space Shuttle that I learned recently...

So you just watched that Engineering Connections episode too, eh?

Quote:

The solution was in the rocket fuel itself - the liquid oxygen which is super cool - this liquid actually travels on the outside of the cone (the small circular pipes you see running on the outside of the nozzle) and once they reach the end of the nozzle (the open end) they travel back inside the nozzle up tiny little tubes and then mix up with the rest of the rocket fuel and get burned to provide the thrust.

IIRC, in that show they stated that the cooling is so effective, the nozzle maintains a temperature around 50C (122F), even though the flame itself is around 3000C (5500F). Pretty sweet.

The Shuttle program has been active for just slightly longer than I've been alive. I was very young when my family lived in California, but I still remember being on a bicycle with my mom and noticing that a Shuttle was landing. I can't say for sure, but I think I've been interested in space, and science in general, ever since. We're at the end of an era now, but we can all hope that the end of one age heralds the beginning of a new one. There's a big universe out there, and I think that humans are a restless enough species that we won't be content just looking at it for much longer.

I lived in Orlando, FL from 1st to 3rd grade, and I remember several times watching the Shuttle launch live on TV, then going outside and being able to see the contrail from the Cape (about 70 miles away) as the Shuttle made its way to orbit. I was always amazed and have had a profound appreciation for the incredible marvel of the whole process my whole life. I'll be watching the launch today and hoping for a safe and successful final journey.

On a related note, MSNBC has a photo documentary & time lapse of the process of moving the Shuttle from its hanger bay to mounting it to the boosters & fuel tank. I had read many times how HUGE those buildings are, but seeing the Shuttle hoisted up so high and dangling there in mid-air gives me a new sense for scale. Wow!http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... =cosmiclog

I think Bob Zubrin said it best (I'm paraphrasing): "The Shuttle launch system is, approximately, a 100-tonnes-to-LEO stack, that returns 90 tonnes to the earth."

I still don't understand why the "use existing hardware to create the Ares booster" idea didn't fly. Basically, you strip the Shuttle off that beautiful stack, and stick 100 tonnes of cargo on top of the main tank (including a small return vehicle for the 'nauts if you need it) and.... do whatever you want.

Heck, the ISS only weighs 400 tonnes -- so that's 4 shots of the Ares booster (rather than 14 years of Shuttle launches) -- and you assemble the bulk of the thing on earth where tools stay where you put them.

And 100-tonnes-to-LEO means you can deliver 40 tonnes to Mars. In one shot. So we either put humans up there for long-duration do-heaps-of-science missions, or alternatively launch a batch of 40 Spirit-class rovers (including all their Mars landing hardware, etc.) in a single shot. Imagine 40 of those little beauties charging all over Mars... or 25 of them and two high-bandwidth sats to transfer all the data back...

We gotta stop with the "Lamborghini" model of space exploration (a couple dozen highly-strung sports cars a year costing millions) and go with the "Toyota" model (maximum sharing of parts, big production runs, cost engineering, and tens of thousands of perfectly usable *cheap and reliable* vehicles p.a.).

Is there a list of some things that were actually accomplished during the 30-year run? I'll also accept accomplishments of the ISS as a surogate if necessary.

Other than "We got into space", there doesn't seem much point to the nearly $200B spent.

Start with NASA's Spinoff publication. You have a NASA grant to thank for the mouse you're using to navigate this site. You have NASA research to thank for the satellites that let you find directions or get accurate weather forecasts. Hospitals can monitor multiple patients at once because NASA needed to monitor the health of their astronauts. Cochlear implants were developed by a NASA electrical engineer. Lifeshears to cut accident victims out of crushed vehicles, breast cancer screenings, grooved runways and then the application of the same tech to highways, which has reduced highway accidents by 85%, treatments for ADHD, the aerodynamics of the Nerf Glider, finding good areas for planting vineyards, matchmaking software for Internet dating. You probably can't go a day without using something that owes its existence to NASA. It may not all be directly related to the shuttle program, but much of it is.

Edit: They've got a page dedicated to Space Shuttle Spinoffs, of which there have been over 100, from artificial hearts to video stabilization software.

First off, those are effectively government grants, most of then military related.

Secondly, how many more grants could have been made if 200 billion dollars hadn't been wasted on the shuttle?

There's no way to know. Just as there's no way to know how many people were inspired to do amazing things just because the Shuttle existed. But we can know that over 100 new technologies were developed thanks to research done for the Shuttle program, as I noted in my edit.

Matt Ford / Matt is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, focusing on physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. When he's not writing, he works on realtime models of large-scale engineering systems.